Post

xkcd.com/386/ 🙂

schwassonance

Wut?

As a British speaker, I didn’t get it. In my dialect, it’s the “uh” in Centre, Vicar, Lighter (basically anything ending in “er” or “ar”).

Yeah. This seems to require an American accent to work.

Love this! Can I use it in class??? 🐾💖

This is /ʌ/ erasure!

I stuck in about 5 vowels that I was sure of and used the schwa everywhere else. My explanation “I’m from New Zealand”. I got invited to do honours. 🙃

The schwa is the vowel sound (like a soft A or "uh" sound) in each word in the comic. Even though all the words have different vowels in them, the sound they all make is the same.

Glad to help!

That’s a great video! I was thinking about this issue the other day when it comes to how we pronounce “the.” Such a basic building block of the language, but we’ll still say it two different ways, depending, and usually it’s the schwa version unless we really want to emphasize something.

You are a true gent 🎩! Thank you!

Disclaimer: I just read the explanation and I still don't really understand but YMMV

Vowel drift?

Even better would be schwə

Lol

lmaoo

If I read only the vowel sounds of each word, the u in up, the u in truck and the first o in onion sound a little bit different than the rest of the schwas (and all similar to each other)

What is it that Americans have against consonants in the middle of a word? Pet hate in UK at the moment is a TV ident proclaiming in an American voice, "Documennaries brought to you by Channel 4". And don't start me on the "Innernational Space Station".

I want to hear this presented as a sketch several times by different groups of people with a variety of regional accents.

I love how you're taking a dig at LaMalfa or as my mom likes to call him LaMafia

Different pronunciations: Allow us to introduce ourselves But yeah, the fact that it is viable at all is lovely impressive

If you’re from New Zealand you can talk like this all the time!

Ironically that sound appears three times in my officemate's full name, yet I'm the one whose last name it dominates.

National Schwa Day is coming soon! nationalschwaday.org

True for American English, I suppose.

with some allophonic variation, of course.

This is incredible 🤓

Must be a regional thing, but as an Anglo-Quebecer I absolutely pronounce it gunna.

Might be an English accent thing but "what's up" are definitely distinctly different vowel sounds.

If I had to be a vowel sound I'd like to be a schwa, because they're rarely stressed.

Imagine teaching phonics to kids, doing short vowel drills, teaching magic E and vowel teams… and then having to tell them that vowels schwa most of the time anyway. 🙃

Thank you 🙏

Listening to the audio examples there, all but two of these still read as /ə/ to me--but what's funny is one of the two exceptions is one of the very few that *does* read as /ʌ/ to me is one of the very few that you retained as /ə/! ("gonna" and "'cause" are both /ʌ/ for me.)

🤣🤣🤣

Hi.

Jeff Goldblum is the Proto Everyman

Not in Spanish!

Czech: only used for the "uh" filler "word" ( @piskvor.bsky.social)

In my linguistic experience (English , Spanish, French, Japanese, Norwegian, Mandarin), the languages that use schwa besides English are French (unaccented E) and Mandarin, which uses it a lot.

Alt: Doug's cousin, the one from London, runs a Bumble love cult.

and it sounds strangely suitable if you rap it instead of reading it

I do love some brunch

Uh, what

Fun!

Title text: "Doug's cousin, the one from London, runs a Bumble love cult." Alt text: https://explainxkcd.com/2907#Transcript

i don't think i ever pronounce "a" like that